I needed this, but why exactly?

You Are an Excellent Cook


You're a top cook, but you weren't born that way. It's taken a lot of practice, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of learning.
It's likely that you have what it takes to be a top chef, should you have the desire...
Are You A Good Cook?

I found this quiz over at sweetmemes. Well, yes, I'm a good cook. That's a no brainer. So why exactly did I need to copy, paste, html edit out the white background so I could proclaim to the world I can do something well? I can do lots of things pretty well, actually. What I can't do well is sing when I don't know the music. As a kid I used to love to sing. My grandmother would sing with me and she taught me all the old hymns and ballads popular in her day. I memorized everything she sang to me. My mother, however, couldn't "carry a tune in a basket if it were sheet music" and her encouragement was less than stellar. Over time I learned to sing softly (if at all) around her. Except when she died.

Come to think of it, that was pretty weird. My mother lay dying in the hospital in a coma. She had suffered a massive stroke, probably her third. She lay there a week until she died, and every day I'd visit for a few hours and sing to her. To this day I'm not sure if I was trying to comfort her or p*ss her off so she'd wake up. I hope I didn't add insult to her agony in those last days. She never woke up to say.

Last night at Tenebrae I was presenter for the Compline part of the service. The presenter essentially starts all the music, then the rest of the choir joins in. She "presents" the psalm tones so everyone will know which ending to sing. That was the easy part. However... we sing a medieval version of plainsong that has four bars instead of the standard five, (which means you can't hammer it out on the piano) and there were two responds that were tricky. One I couldn't figure out to save my life, or when I did figure it out, I couldn't remember what I'd figured the next time I sang it. I was up til 2:00 am the night before practicing... to little avail.

So last night I got through the first one without too much bungling but the second one (the hard one) I botched royally. If you didn't read music you may not have known exactly where I crashed, but you still knew something was off. Oh well.

The best thing about being sixty is that failures like this don't humiliate me anymore. If I'd been twenty or thirty or even forty... I'd have been mortified. My face would turn red, I'd either giggle or cry, and I'd certainly vow never to sing in public again. Ever. But I will. I like to sing.

So for today, I take solace in the fact that I can cook. Sometimes I can sing... but I can always cook.